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This week is TED week –
when some of the most relevant minds in society, business, and
culture congregate to give speeches 18 minutes long sharing their
ideas about how to change the world.

The series is important for a number of reasons, not least of
which is that it gives us a fresh collective zeitgeist into which
we can sink our minds, hopes, energies, and efforts – wiping the
slate clean of past problems and upgrading to more novel ones –
of sorts.

For surely, the challenges that we face might be brought to light
in a mere 18 minutes, but could take a lifetime or more to solve
– and for which there may never be a clear solution. Yet there is
purpose in a cause greater than one’s self.

TED is also important for its endurance. Many of the talks shared
even years ago still resonate. Education, the area about which
I’m most passionate, will forever be a mainstay in the panoply of
discussion topics. Sir Ken Robinson’s talks from 2006 and 2010
are today more significantly yardsticks against which to measure
what we still haven’t accomplished in the evolution of education
than they are to measure what we have.

While giving a TED talk is not
on my agenda this year, if I had to prepare hypothetically for
one, I would have picked right up where Sir Robinson left off and
talked about my model for a new kind of school. Here goes.

First, education is not a
bureaucratic expedient to advance the economic interests of the
incumbency. Education is about creating a better future and
opening children’s eyes to the possibilities of life and the
power they have within themselves to create positive change in
their lives and the lives of others. Children need something to
believe in, and what they most need to believe in is themselves.
Good teachers help bring out the best in children in this
way.

I see a few main problems with
education today, namely that we teach children to obey, to sit,
to behave, to study for long periods of time before they are
asked to produce a product. We don’t teach doing, and the only
results that count are the ones that can be measured because they
have been completed. Teachers themselves must also be held to a
higher standard.

Therefore, the school I propose
(grades 7-12) would be run as a business. I come from a finance
background and would set my school up in two divisions linked
closely together. The business division would handle the school’s
monetary dealings and would be run similarly to a hedge fund
model. The business would raise money that it would manage and
use its fees and profits to subsidize the students’ tuition and
offer higher salaries for younger teachers.*

The managers would be held
accountable for their results, with the primary goal being to
fund the future of education rather than their own personal
accounts, and the students would become aware at a younger age of
the fundamental concepts of business: margin, inflows equaling
and exceeding outflows, and the importance of return on
investment. (No matter what field you go into, a working
knowledge of business concepts is a pre-requisite for enduring
success.)

The second division would be
the education division, which would handle the teaching of the
students and curricula development. We would recruit teachers who
are experienced educators with a proven track record of success,
retired business and finance professionals, and young
professionals with a resume of community involvement, leadership,
achievement, and accountability.

One of the issues that
education faces today is in finding good teachers, namely because
of the pay scale. Young, bright people are often motivated to go
into more lucrative industries such as law and finance where they
can earn larger salaries, but where there tends to be a surfeit
of supply. We need to recruit people that would otherwise go into
these higher-paying fields into education using various
incentives that they might be afforded in other
industries.

The other issue is equitable
remuneration to teachers for impact created. The results teachers
produce are often viewed as intangible because the output is in
the cultivation of students’ character, self-esteem, and critical
thinking abilities – all things that are difficult to measure,
but surely contribute to a student’s ability to create
wealth.

In my model, I propose that my
school would be entitled to a royalty on every dollar earned by
our students over a certain threshold, and those dollars would
essentially be distributed to teachers as bonuses for their
contribution to students’ earning potential –similar to how an
entrepreneur might be rewarded for selling a successful business
a decade or two after he created it. In other words, the students
would be required to pay a percentage of their income (over a
certain amount) to the school to recycle that money back into the
school in the form of a royalty or “management fee” of sorts for
the education subsidy (in the form of tuition) and personal
development that they received while matriculating.

My model solves a few main
problems:

First, the problem of
business mentorship.Successful business types are often
exclusively made available to MBA programs from which they
graduated, but mentors need to be more readily built into the
framework of the daily learning process. With teachers that are
industry professionals and veterans, students would learn the
fundamentals of business and have access to invaluable mentorship
every day.

Recruiting top talent to the education field. By
offering higher pay and greater incentives, my school could
recruit some of the top young minds and offer them long-term
career prospects for which they could develop youth while also
continuing to build their business careers.

Accountability. The school would only succeed if
the investments made by the managers proved sound. Rather than
invest with a mindset of leverage for mere personal profit,
investments would be made with the school’s best interest in
mind, thus inherently reducing risk and placing the priorities of
education first and personal reward second.

Rewarding schools and teachers. A proper
recycling of cash back into schools and a rewarding of teachers
who often are the most influential people in all of our lives.
Good schools and teachers are often largely responsible for
students’ future successes, but don’t always receive the credit
they deserve. My system would reward the schools with a perpetual
annuity on alumni income earned that would go towards funding the
school’s endowment, and give teachers an “equity claim” in the
students they teach and the economic results those students
achieve over the course of their careers.

Why is this model
important?First, we
need talented young people to invest their lives in developing
the next generation of leaders and who can also continue to
pursue their business interests in the context of their working
environments. Let these young professionals, who would otherwise
go onto an MBA program or Private Equity firm, teach students the
skills they learned in their first few years of work while also
learning from the portfolio managers who would be managing the
business side of the school.

Moreover, we need to generate
an increasing focus on the importance of ROI (return on
investment) in all that we do. Results in the business world are
measured through actions; the more value that each action
produces, the greater the intrinsic worth of that action. By
using a model of accountability with a focus on results, students
will learn more about doing and will take action to produce
results that actually matter: ones that are completed and thus
can be measured for optimally efficient ROI.

This school model is a system
that sustains itself, rewards fairly those that are a part of it,
and provides opportunity for growth. The more effectively that
the teachers can teach their students about leadership and
producing meaningful results, the more the school and the
students are rewarded. The emphasis remains on education.
Furthermore, students’ talents are explored and developed earlier
in life creating more evolved adults, thus increasing the
lifetime value of their output and contribution to the economy
and society.

While there would be a focus on
economics, leadership, athletics, and service, many of the
right-brain disciplines such as art, music, and dance would
certainly be taught for they stimulate our creative sides and aid
in the building of problem-solving skills and fulfilling
relationships, which often further lend to our ability to create
economic success and cultivate creativity. The thing is, when
kids are encouraged to produce bodies of work, whether they are
paintings or a calculus problem set, they learn how to prepare to
be wrong, which is where originality emanates. My school is not
conscripting a cadre of academic mercenaries, but rather
developing a student body that will learn what talents it has and
put them to good use early in life.

The days of giving students a
month to write a paper and grading them on a select cohort of
prosaic criteria is neither serving our children nor the world.
We need to cultivate a group of critical thinkers, problem
solvers, civic-minded citizens, and doers who view failure as a
necessary – and welcome – by-product of pursuing a worthy cause
and who will measure their success not merely by the money they
earn, but by the lives they touch along the way. Having a greater
appreciation for teachers shall accomplish this shift in
values.

My model is surely not
foolproof, but much in the spirit of TED, it addresses concretely
a model for a better education system and plants the seed that
can germinate through further probing, harvesting, and, of
course, taking action.

*Here’s some math backing my assumptions. If
the fund were to raise $500,000,000 and earn 10% per year, that
would be gross earnings of $50,000,000. If the school consisted
of six classes, and each class comprised 100 students, that would
make for 600 students in the school. That leaves $83,333 per
student to cover tuition. If each student’s tuition cost $40,000,
that’s a net overage of $26,000,000 (600 x $43,333.) If the
school employed 100 teachers (one teacher for every six students)
and paid each $100,000, that would still leave $16,000,000 left
over for further investment. And these assumptions are just for
the first year of operation and do not account for compound
interest. Conversely, they do not account for
losses.